Sunday, December 18, 2016

Ratik Asokan at ARTFORUM reports: These photographs, shot between 1988 and 1992 in Grapevine Branch (a
small community in West Virginia) were made collaboratively. Not wanting
to rehearse the old narrative of “poor isolated rednecks,” Susan Lipper
involved her subjects in the storytelling process, visualizing their
personal myths. It’s surprising, then, that her work features those
familiar tokens—guns, Klan hoods, bibles, booze—that decorate the
liberal’s imaginary tableaux of the rural South. How did these props end
up there? And, more to the point, what is it that is so unsettling
about the results?

About Me

My pictures explore the strange anthropology of cities. The unusual and overlooked in the human landscape.
I am asking the viewer to question the idea that photographs as documents are complete representations of subject.
I'm interested in the universality of life and the idea of parallel lives - when one thing is happening here, something else is happening over there. The democracy of non-places fascinates me, in the knowledge that inevitably nothing is as it seems.
I work and live between Auckland and Paris.
http://harveybenge.com/
email:harvey.benge@xtra.co.nz